This is also why you see the assumption among science deniers that people have at best “questionable motives” or at worst “nefarious intent.” Which largely explains the defamation you see on science denier blogs and websites. It doesn’t take much for science deniers to jump from assuming nefarious intent to assigning nefarious intent and screeching “fraud” and “fakery” (see ‘climategate‘ for the perfect example).

Which brings me to the latest incident involving Lubos Motl who has made some very serious accusations. Based on stolen material from a private forum he’s claiming that John Cook committed identity theft. Which doesn’t make any sense as it wasn’t public and no personal information was used (which you need to make it identity theft). I’ll let Cook explain what actually happened:

A number of peer-reviewed studies have observed a link between climate science denial and conspiratorial thinking. The most prominent examples are the conspiracy theories extrapolated from quote-mined excerpts of stolen private correspondence of climate scientists, in the episode known as climategate. A similar conspiratorial episode spun from quote-mined stolen private correspondence was published by Lubos Motl this week, and has been uncritically propagated by other online commenters.

The stolen private correspondence from 2011 involved Skeptical Science team members developing comment threads (both supporting and rejecting climate science) for use in a psychology experiment. In the private forum (only), I posted a few comments under the pseudonym Lubos_Motl (to signify that the comments were taking a contrarian stance). The username was changed to an anonymous name for the experiment. In other words, it was not used in the experiment and was never used outside of the private Skeptical Science forum.

Consequently, Motl’s accusations of identity theft are demonstrably false. Further, I find it extraordinary that Motl publicly posts comments about me being hanged, and allows public comments on his blog that approve of torturing and murdering me. I find it equally extraordinary that such misleading and venomous posts are uncritically endorsed by third parties such as Richard Tol, Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke Jr.

Quite a different story than the one Lubos Motl paints (archived here). The language used by Motl goes way beyond civil discourse. What makes it even worse is that this is, by his own admittance, based on stolen private material:

[H]e was discussing things with his fellow climate warriors at the Skeptical Science Forums, a website affiliated with his SkepticalScience.COM. The website was “closed” and only accessible to the community of Cook’s friends, not publicly available[…]

Which means that Cook couldn’t have committed identity theft. Especially when Motl also quotes Cook from the forum with the following:

Note re Lubos Motl: I won’t use the name Lubos Motl or any of our names in the final webpage used in the experiment (so the last two comments by Rob and Steve won’t be used, I’m afraid).

But that hasn’t stopped Science deniers and their enablers from eating this up. At no moment did they pause and wonder if what Motl claims actually happened. It was mud that they could throw and they wanted to see if it would stick. They also didn’t care about the fact that Motl said that John should die. This last one is quite telling, especially when those that are promoting Motl’s claims demand you are civil towards them.

Who else has John Cook impersonated? Has he encouraged his team to do this? These are valid questions that need answers.

In his update he continues:

The point that needs to be driven home is that rather than getting real comments, he had his buddies (and himself) write faked up comments from their own perspective as “fake skeptics”, and then analyzed those for his research experiment. Whether the results of that experiment made it into any published research is unknown.

Watts has no idea what the context of the comments were, how they were used, or what was being researched. I can tell you that it’s going to be really embarrassing for Watts when the paper comes out, as what Watts is speculating here is not even close to what happened (which is rather obvious with the explanation Cook provided). Though it’s par the course for Watts about anything involving Skeptical Science.

I suspect this has to do with the detail that for Soon there’s actually a case to be made, but in the case of Cook it’s science deniers spinning yarn out of quotes from private comments that they have taken out of context.

6 reader comments

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Reading the post by Motl the reader could at least pick up the truth himself that it was private role play. If you read the post at WUWT it is easy to come away with the impression that Cook impersonated mitigation sceptics in blog comments to smear them. Reading the WUWT comments most WUWT readers got this impression.

Truly disgusting behaviour by Anthony Watts. And it should be remembered that WUWT claims to be the most read blog of the political movement against mitigation. I will have a hard time trusting any mitigation sceptic that does not disown WUWT. If there are mitigation sceptics with a real scientific interest I would suggest they start their own movement.

Maybe less visible to many: Roger A. Pielke Sr. retweeted the tweet of Roger Pielke Jr. calling Cook “shameful” and pointing to the misleading WUWT post and Pielke Sr reteweeted the tweet of Pielke Jr. dismissing the shameful behaviour of WUWT after having been pointed to the information at HotWhopper that the communication was private role play.

Am I the only person thinks that even if it were for some private role playing, to use real names is a little juvenile – like naughty boys having a private joke at those nasty skeptics/deniers?

If it wouldn’t be in the published paper, it shouldn’t be in the game playing. Skeptic A, Skeptic B, etc would have been the professional thing to do. [snip]

So while Cooks motives in this case may have only been juvenile, it is hardly surprising some people considered they may have been nefarious. However the best approach in any such cases is to ask the person in question first.

It might be considered juvenile, though I think this was harmless. I’ve seen far worse in private materials than a simple prod towards science deniers (look up the source code for Windows 2000, that has some interesting and colourful language in there). With the context now provided by John’s statement it’s perfectly clear that this is being blown way out of proportions.

And yes, they should have first simply asked John what was going on. Though the answers to that is already present in the materials that Motl quoted…

Collin Maessen is the founder and editor of Real Skeptic and a proponent of scientific skepticism. For his content he uses the most up to date and best research as possible. Where necessary consulting or collaborating with scientists.

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The goal of Real Skeptic is to take a critical look at scientific claims and investigate what the scientific literature and experts say about it. As skepticism doesn’t start with the viewpoints and claims of others, and being skeptical about those does not make you a skeptic. Being a skeptic starts with examining your own viewpoints, the positions you hold, and the claims you make.